hcsmnews

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Biosensor detects coronavirus from nasopharyngeal swabs in less than one minute Researchers have developed a new biosensor that can detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19, from nasopharyngeal swabs in under one minute.

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Scorpion venom shows promise for treating fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

Tamapin, an investigational drug derived from Indian red scorpion venom, reverses motor deficits in pre-clinical models of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

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Why women are more likely to have a heart attack that goes unnoticed:

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These are cookies and they are ART.

No topping these!! 👀

Created by SarmieSisterSweets

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What it’s like to live without a sense of smell?

Olfactory disturbances have wide-ranging implications for both the mental health and emotional well being of sufferers.

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A nurse wraps a bandage around the hand of a Chinese soldier while another wounded soldier limps up for first aid treatment, during fighting on the Salween River front in Yunnan province (China, June 22nd, 1943).

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““The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.””

—

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Has anyone ever got the wrong patient before?

I got about a minute in to explaining why he needs anticoagulation for his AF before I realised the ward layout is backwards and I was in fact talking to bed 4 not bed 2. Anyone else done this before?

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THIS IS WHAT YOUR BLOOD LOOKS LIKE

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Mind mapping my way through this nutrition block

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The Groundbreaking Brain of Phineas Gage

Those who knew Phineas well were astonished by his recent behavior. He was rude, outspoken, impatient, and unpredictable, traits that never would have described him only a few years earlier. What should have shocked them more was that he was even still around to exhibit these behaviors. The accident should have killed him in the blink of an eye.

In the fall of 1848 Phineas Gage was twenty-five years old and working as a blasting foreman tasked with preparing a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vermont. Gage had no formal schooling, but he developed an excellent reputation of being a savvy businessman armed with intelligence, precision, and a huge amount of energy. He was described as a very physically fit and healthy young man who almost never succumbed to any form of illness. When Gage went to work on September 13th of that year nothing seemed out of the ordinary despite the work being extremely dangerous. Setting up a bed for the new railroad required a large number of explosives and blasting away rock to make way for the new lines.  A large hole was bored into the rock and filled with explosive materials and a fuse. Once the explosives were in place inside the rock the rest of the hole was filled with sand or clay which was then tightly packed in with a long metal rod called a tamping iron in order to ensure the force of the blast was contained inside the rock. At approximately 4:30pm Gage was hard at work when a tamping rod clipped a rock that was armed with an explosive charge. The hit created a spark which ignited the explosives inside sending the metal tamping rod shooting through the air…and straight through Gage’s head.

A cleared railroad path 3/4 mile south of Cavendish, Vermont. This site is similar to the one Gage was working on when the accident happened.

Gage hit the ground and probably had no idea what just happened to him. The tamping rod was1.25” in diameter, forty-three inches long, weighed thirteen pounds, and sailed clear through his left cheek, through his brain, and out the top of his skull landing eighty feet away from its victim. What was even more shocking than the accident was that Gage was not just alive, he was fully conscious and able to walk himself to an oxcart and request a ride into town to see a doctor. Once arriving at the practice of Dr. Edward H. Williams he even quipped, “Here is business enough for you.”

Dr. Williams heard Gage’s claims that he had been shot through the head with an iron rod but he initially didn’t believe him. He was here, alive, speaking and joking, how could his story possibly be true? But, the horrifying tale was quickly proven accurate to Dr. Williams who recounted:

 “I first noticed the wound upon the head before I alighted from my carriage, the pulsations of the brain being very distinct. Mr. Gage, during the time I was examining this wound, was relating the manner in which he was injured to the bystanders. I did not believe Mr. Gage’s statement at that time but thought he was deceived. Mr. Gage persisted in saying that the bar went through his head… Mr. G. got up and vomited; the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor.“

Later that evening the case of Phineas Gage was handed over to Dr. John Martyn Harlow who treated the wounds and continued to observe his new patient. According to Harlow’s later description, Gage remained fully conscious that night, was able to recount what happened, recalled the names of his coworkers, and even said he didn’t need to see any of his friends because he would be back to work in “a day or two.”

Gage may have anticipated bouncing back to work in a matter of days, but his plans were derailed when he developed an infection. Laying in a semi-comatose state, the doctors believed Gage’s luck ran out and this was the long-delayed end of their patient. From September 23rd to October 3rd Gage languished but then he suddenly began to improve. On October 7th he took his first steps out of bed and by the 11th his intellect began to re-emerge. Gage could remember the accident, the day and time it happened, and his coworkers. But, he now had difficulty with other functions like understanding size and calculating sums of money. While there were some obvious changes, most did not question them. After all, the man just survived a metal spike being launched through his head. By the end of the month Gage left medical care and went to his parent’s home in New Hampshire to continue his recovery.

Illustrations of the injuries suffered by Gage.

Gage amazed those around him by continuing to physically heal and improve, but the changes in his personality became more and more concerning. Before the accident the foreman was hard working, intelligent, and highly respected by his employers who considered him “the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ.” However, as time moved on deep transformations revealed themselves. In later observations by Dr. Harlow he noted that Gage:

 “Remembers passing and past events correctly, as well before as since the injury. Intellectual manifestations feeble, being exceedingly capricious and childish, but with a will as indomitable as ever; is particularly obstinate; will not yield to restraint when it conflicts with his desires.”

 “He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires…. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.”

 By the middle of 1849 Gage was eager to get back to work but there was a problem, his personality changes were so severe that his former employers refused to hire him back. They were not the only ones seeing the massive shift in the man. His friends put it bluntly. The man appeared the same, but he was “no longer Gage.”

 Unwelcome at his former job Gage was forced to find other ways to support himself and he took on a variety of new professions, one of which was to simply show up. He took work at a livery stable in New Hampshire, but Gage also made appearances throughout New England where he promoted himself and his impossible survival. His most high-profile venue was none other than the Barnum American Museum in New York City. In 1852 Gage was given the opportunity to travel to Chile and work as a stagecoach driver while caring for horses. He remained in Chile until approximately 1859 when his health declined. He left the country and made the journey to San Francisco where his mother and sister relocated to at the same approximate time that he moved to South America. According to his mother, the sight of her son was grim and he was “…in a feeble condition, having failed very much since he left New Hampshire…Had many ill turns while in Valparaiso, especially during the last year, and suffered much from hardship and exposure.”

An advertisement for Phineas Gage appearance shortly before his move to Chile.

 Once Gage recovered in San Francisco he was again eager to get back to work and he found employment on a farm, but his time there did not last long. In 1860 Gage began having seizures that rapidly grew in severity. On May 16th 1860 Gage went into violent convulsions and never recovered, he died at the age of 36 years old.

 Dr. Harlow had not treated Gage for many years but when he heard of his death in California he requested that the family send him his former patient’s skull. They obliged and sent Harlow not only Gage’s skull, but also the thing that made it so desirable. The tamping iron that went through his skull was Gage’s near constant companion for some years, it was even inscribed with its story:

 “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr Phinehas[sic] P. Gage at Cavendish Vermont Sept 14,[sic] 1848. He fully recovered from the injury & deposited this bar in the Museum of the Medical College of Harvard University.

Phinehas P. Gage  •   Lebanon Grafton Cy N–H  •   Jan 6 1850”

Gage pictured with the tamping rod that went through his head.

After studying the skull and iron Dr. Harlow donated both pieces to Harvard Medical School’s Warren Anatomical Museum where it remains today. The rest of Gage was originally buried in San Francisco’s Lone Mountain Cemetery but in 1940 his remains were moved to Cypress Lawn Memorial Park located in Colma, California.

Throughout his treatment of Gage, Dr. Harlow had suspicions about why his patient’s personality changed so drastically after his accident but the connection between personality and brain injury were still years away from being recognized. It took another decade until the experimental work of David Ferrier came to light describing how damage to the frontal cortex of the brain resulted in “a very decided alteration in the animal’s character and behavior.” Gage, who sustained extreme damage to up to 4% of the cerebral cortex and 1% of the white matter in the frontal lobe, became one of the earliest examples in medical history that the frontal cortex was involved in personality and behavior.  

 September 13th 1848 was a life changing day for Gage in ways that he never could have expected. It was the day he almost died, the day he became a legend, and a day that changed the early days of neuroscience. To this day the skull of Phineas Gage is still being studied and still giving insight into the connection between brain and behavior, a horrific workplace accident still making medical history 171 years later.

The skull of Phineas Gage and the tamping rod from his accident.

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Study shows how specific gene variants may raise bipolar disorder risk

A new study by researchers at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT finds that the protein CPG2 is significantly less abundant in the brains of people with bipolar disorder (BD) and shows how specific mutations in the SYNE1 gene that encodes the protein undermine its expression and its function in neurons.

Led by Elly Nedivi, professor in MIT’s departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and former postdoc Mette Rathje, the study goes beyond merely reporting associations between genetic variations and psychiatric disease. Instead, the team’s analysis and experiments show how a set of genetic differences in patients with bipolar disorder can lead to specific physiological dysfunction for neural circuit connections, or synapses, in the brain.

The mechanistic detail and specificity of the findings provide new and potentially important information for developing novel treatment strategies and for improving diagnostics, Nedivi said.

“It’s a rare situation where people have been able to link mutations genetically associated with increased risk of a mental health disorder to the underlying cellular dysfunction,” said Nedivi, senior author of the study online in Molecular Psychiatry. “For bipolar disorder this might be the one and only.”

The researchers are not suggesting that the CPG2-related variations in SYNE1 are “the cause” of bipolar disorder, but rather that they likely contribute significantly to susceptibility to the disease. Notably, they found that sometimes combinations of the variants, rather than single genetic differences, were required for significant dysfunction to become apparent in laboratory models.

“Our data fit a genetic architecture of BD, likely involving clusters of both regulatory and protein-coding variants, whose combined contribution to phenotype is an important piece of a puzzle containing other risk and protective factors influencing BD susceptibility,” the authors wrote.

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I haven’t studied damn near at all the week and I feel like it’s going to bite me in the ass later

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Just gone back on the pill and my meds after a week without and I can already feel my sex drive just draining out of me 🙃